What do small online businesses actually sell for?

A multiple is a ratio, and a ratio hides its own scale. "Content sites sell at about 1.4× profit" is true and almost useless on its own, because it is equally consistent with a $400 sale and a $400,000 one. The multiple tells you the relationship between price and earnings. It does not tell you which market you are standing in.

That matters most for the two decisions people actually make. A seller deciding whether a sale is worth the paperwork needs a price. A buyer deciding whether a category is worth learning needs to know the size of the cheque. Both questions are answered by the dollar column and neither is answered by the ratio.

"Rows we hold" is every sale we have recorded for the type. "Priced comps" is the far smaller number of those whose listing published enough to compute a profit multiple — the only rows a price figure here is drawn from. Where that count falls under five we publish no figures at all rather than a median that one more deal would move.

A dollar figure with no stated population is a decoration, so here is ours. Each row is built from the most recent 200 sales we hold for that asset type, narrowed to the ones whose listing published enough to compute a profit multiple, with the extreme 5% at each end of the multiple range trimmed off once the sample is large enough to trim. The median sold price is the middle of what is left; the range in brackets is the 25th to 75th percentile — the middle half of those sales.

Three consequences worth carrying with you. The window is recent, not all-time, so these figures move as the market does. The narrowing to listings that published their profit is not a neutral filter — a seller who publishes numbers is running a different kind of sale from one who does not. And these are the sales that closed, which is a different population again from the asks you see while browsing; the gap between the two is the subject of asking price vs sold price.

Read the two dollar columns against each other and, for several asset types, something looks wrong: the median sale is a fraction of the annual profit the same listings claimed. That is not a typo on our side and it is not a bargain waiting for you. It is the market pricing the claim rather than the number — a median below one year of stated profit is what a market that does not fully believe its own listings looks like.

That effect is large enough in our data to deserve its own treatment rather than a paragraph here. What a profit multiple actually means covers how to read a median below 1×, and how long until a bought site pays for itself works through what an implausibly short implied payback is telling a buyer to go and check.

Domain sales are the largest block of rows we hold and they publish essentially no profit figures, because a parked domain generally has no profit to publish. So the domain row shows a large count beside empty price columns — the honest rendering of a category we can count but cannot price on this basis. Domains are priced on comparable names, length, extension and demand, not on earnings; that is a separate question with a separate page.

It is also the reason to read the "rows we hold" column before anything else on this page. A big number there is a statement about how much we have collected, not about how much of it can price your business.